Flanked by two bodyguards, Metaâs CEO solemnly strode into a Washington, DC courtroom. Despite his last-ditch efforts to avoid a trial, he was there, jaw clenched, to defend his company from being broken up by the US government.
Shortly after he was sworn in, the Federal Trade Commissionâs lead attorney for the case, Daniel Matheson, asked Zuckerberg to reflect back on when Facebook was the underdog.
âIn hindsight, youâre glad you didnât sell to MySpace?â Matheson asked.
âYes,â Zuckerberg responded.
Over the next several hours of questioning, Matheson walked Zuckerberg down memory lane to the period just before Facebookâs $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012, which the FTC claims was the first in a series of anti-competitive steps that locked out other companies. In a lawsuit that was initially filed five years ago and went to trial this week, the agency argues that Meta should be forced to spin off both Instagram and WhatsApp, which it later acquired for roughly $19 billion in 2014.
While on the stand, Zuckerberg seemed to slowly relax as he recounted major moments from Facebookâs early history, …
On Monday, Meta will face the Federal Trade Commission in a legal fight that could reshape the social media landscape.
Over the next two months, the US government will make its case that the companyâs 2012 acquisition of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp squashed potential threats to its dominance. Meta, which went by the name of Facebook at the time, will defend itself by arguing that it helped grow those acquisitions into large businesses used by billions of people while facing plenty of competition along the way. The companyâs senior executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, are expected to testify during the trial in Washington, DC.
The trial itself has been a long time coming. Itâs based on a lawsuit filed under the first Trump administration and then amended under the Biden administration, seeking solutions as dramatic as unwinding Meta’s big mergers. Itâs the third US trial attempting to bust up Big Tech in two years, following the Justice Departmentâs successful case against Googleâs search business and a second one pending a decision against its ad tech business. It kicks off amid a broad rethinking of how antitrust …
WhatsApp has rolled out a dozen new features across chats, calls, and channels that make it easier to manage group conversations, alongside other general quality-of-life improvements. One of the more notable additions is a new “Online” indicator for groups, which displays how many participants are currently using the app in real time.
This is one of several new features that are similar to capabilities on competing communications platforms like Discord, which highlights the online status of server participants. WhatsApp hasn’t mentioned if users will be able to override their own status indicator to manually set themselves as online/offline, but it should make it easier to see how many users are actively reading the chat.
Notifications in group chats will now be easier to manage and organize if you find them overwhelming. Users can select the new “Notify for” setting and tap “Highlight” to place specific limitations on notifications for replies, @mentions, and messages from saved contacts, or select “All” to receive every notification. Group chat participants can also tap on reactions that other users have left on messages to add the same reaction, much like Discord and Slack users can.
Events have been updated to allow users to RSVP as “maybe,” invite a plus one, and specify an end date and time. Events can now also be created in direct messages, and pinned in group chats to make them easier to find.
Two features that are exclusively for iPhone users include a built-in document reader that allows users to scan, crop, and save document files without opening a separate app, and the ability to set WhatsApp as the default app for calls and messages. iPhone users can make the switch by opening their device settings, tapping on “Default Apps,” and selecting WhatsApp.
In the WhatsApp updates tab, users will now find transcriptions of voice messages that they’ve received, and a voice notes feature that allows channel admins to record videos of up to 60 seconds that can be instantly shared with followers. Channel admins can now also link people directly to their channels via a QR code.
Finally, WhatsApp says that video calls have been upgraded to make them “more reliable and higher quality.” WhatsApp users can be added to an ongoing call directly within a chat thread by tapping the call icon, and call participants can now pinch to zoom in to get a closer look at the live video.
Meta is developing a version of Instagram for iPad, according to The Information. Currently, running Instagram on an iPad is just a blown-up version of the iPhone app, so an official Instagram app from Meta would be a very welcome change.
Why would Meta do this now, after ignoring Apple’s tablet for over a decade? According to The Information, the uncertain legal status of TikTok amid the divest-or-ban law and Trump’s tariffs might be the push required.
The company has publicly resisted building an iPad Instagram app before. In February 2022 (more than three years ago!) Instagram boss Adam Mosseri replied to a post from Marques Brownlee about Meta still not having an Instagram app for iPad to explain why.
“We get this one a lot,” Mosseri said. “It’s still just not a big enough group of people to be a priority. Hoping to get to it at some point, but right now we’re very heads down on other things.”
Yup, we get this one a lot. It’s still just not a big enough group of people to be a priority. Hoping to get to it at some point, but right now we’re very heads down on other things.
In 2023, Mosseri said something similar. “Not working on it right now,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing to do at some point. But we have only so many people working at Instagram, so we’ve got to pick the most important things to do to improve Instagram at any given moment. And right now, it’s not quite making the cut.”
Using the Instagram app in Stage Manager on supported iPads is a decent experience, and the web app has improved in recent years. But a native version that takes full advantage of the large display is long overdue.
Meta didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the company is looking to improve the app’s search functionality, admitting this is an area where Instagram could do more to compete. The remarks, made on a recent episode of the “Build Your Tribe” podcast, come at a time when younger Gen Z users often turn to social apps like […]
Over the weekend, Meta dropped two new Llama 4 models: a smaller model named Scout, and Maverick, a mid-size model that the company claims can beat GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash âacross a broad range of widely reported benchmarks.â
Maverick quickly secured the number-two spot on LMArena, the AI benchmark site where humans compare outputs from different systems and vote on the best one. In Metaâs press release, the company highlighted Maverickâs ELO score of 1417, which placed it above OpenAIâs 4o and just under Gemini 2.5 Pro. (A higher ELO score means the model wins more often in the arena when going head-to-head with competitors.)
The achievement seemed to position Metaâs open-weight Llama 4 as a serious challenger to the state-of-the-art, closed models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Then, AI researchers digging through Meta’s documentation discovered something unusual.
In fine print, Meta acknowledges that the version of Maverick tested on LMArena isn’t the same as whatâs available to the public. According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality,â Te …
Aparentemente disposta a continuar envolvida em muitas polêmicas em 2025, a Unity decidiu que o metaverso é o mais novo alvo de suas críticas. Em uma entrevista ao The Verge, o atual CEO da companhia, Matt Bromberg, afirmou que nunca acreditou na ideia das vidas virtuais e que todas as produzidas até o momento “são um lixo”.
“Eu nunca acreditei muito no metaverso durante esse período de tempo”, explicou ele, em referência à decisão do Facebook de mudar seu nome para Meta. “Eu vou te contar o motivo: porque, como um criador de games, eu experimentei todas essas novas plataformas e só pensei que elas eram lixo”.
Segundo Bromberg, muitos metaversos são iguais a jogos que foram construídos há 15 anos e não fornecem uma experiência de uso sustentável. Ao mesmo tempo, o executivo afirma que continua vendo grande potencial em grandes plataformas de jogos como serviço que criam comunidades fortes, como Fortnite, Roblox e FIFA (atual EA Sports FC).
Unity tem passado de investimentos no Metaverso
Apesar das críticas atuais de seu CEO, a Unity tem um passado recente marcado por investimentos no Metaverso e por dar espaço a muitos defensores da tecnologia. Além de o site da empresa abrigar artigos com nomes como “A próxima fronteira de mudança em 2023 e adiante”, ela também comprou a Weta Digital com a intenção de criar um mundo virtual próprio.
Foto: Divulgação/Meta
No entanto, o negócio não deu muito certo e, no final de 2023, a companhia decidiu encerrar as atividades da Weta FX, demitindo mais de 250 pessoas no processo. As declarações recentes de Bromberg fazem parte de sua tentativa de reformar a imagem de sua empresa, que ficou manchada tanto entre jogadores quanto entre desenvolvedores.
Ao propor uma “taxa de instalação” sobre os aplicativos que usavam sua engine, a companhia acabou gerando diversos protestos — e muitos criadores decidiram que não iriam mais trabalhar com ela. Segundo o atual CEO, a companhia quer ajudar a criar jogos com gameplay inovador, ao mesmo tempo que oferece as ferramentas para o oferecimento de visuais impressionantes, caso um criador assim deseje.
One of the new flagship AI models Meta released on Saturday, Maverick, ranks second on LM Arena, a test that has human raters compare the outputs of models and choose which they prefer. But it seems the version of Maverick that Meta deployed to LM Arena differs from the version that’s widely available to developers. […]
Meta has announced Llama 4, its newest collection of AI models that now power the Meta AI assistant on the web and in WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. The two new models, also available to download from Meta or Hugging Face, are Llama 4 Scout — a small model capable of “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU” — and Llama 4 Maverick, which is more akin to GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash. Meta says it’s still in the process of training Llama 4 Behemoth, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says is “the highest performing base model in the world.”
According to Meta, Llama 4 Scout has a 10-million-token context window — the working memory of an AI model — and beats Google’s Gemma 3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite models, as well as the open-source Mistral 3.1, “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks,” while still “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU.” Meta makes similar claims about its larger Maverick model’s performance versus OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, and says its results are comparable to DeepSeek-V3 in coding and reasoning tasks using “less than half the active parameters.”
Meanwhile, Llama 4 Behemoth has 288 billion active parameters with 2 trillion parameters in total. While it hasn’t been released yet, Meta says Behemoth can outperform its competitors (in this case GPT-4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7) “on several STEM benchmarks.”
For Llama 4, Meta says it switched to a “mixture of experts” (MoE) architecture, an approach that conserves resources by using only the parts of a model that are needed for a given task. The company plans to discuss future plans for AI models and products at its LlamaCon conference, which is taking place on April 29th.
As with its past models, Meta calls the Llama 4 collection “open-source,” although Llama has been criticized for its license restrictions. For instance, the Llama 4 license requires commercial entities with more than 700 million monthly active users to request permission from Meta before using its models, which the Open Source Initiative wrote in 2023 takes it “out of the category of ‘Open Source.’”
Meta has released a new collection of AI models, Llama 4, in its Llama family — on a Saturday, no less. There are four new models in total: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. All were trained on “large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data” to give them “broad […]
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